


the marriage bed, sullied

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: After Burn, Character Study, Eliza is angry and burns stuff, F/M, Grief, Hurt, Infidelity, Post Reynolds Pamphlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 05:55:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6692254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She'd been blind to think Alexander Hamilton was anything but a wildfire, forever hungering for more fuel to the flame. Love is blind, but it did not excuse her, or him.</p><p>(love is blind, oh, but how sweet that blindness had been).</p><p> </p><p>After burning the letters, Eliza goes after more kindling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the marriage bed, sullied

She burns the bed too.

Philip and Angie help, her oldest babies, steely eyed and chins quivering. They hurt as much as she does.  It's a group labour to bring it down the stairs and to the back lawn, and Eliza knocks her hips against doorways more than once. They put it down it near the rose shrubs, the ones she had brough from her childhood home because when Alexander kissed her for the first time it had been against those roses. The smell of them had clung to his shabby clothes when he went to talk to her father, and ever since, she'd come to think of his joyful smile whenever she smelled roses.

Belatedly, she asks Angie to bring her perfumes too. She nestles them among the pillows.

(she wonder, what did maria reynolds smell like? something sultry and alluring, no doubt. exotic. nothing so common as roses, to be sure. she wonders, did the pillows smell of her perfume when alexander desecrated their bed? did he fuck her with his wife's perfume on his nose? she doubts it. alexander's focus is all encompassing, especially in bed. how did she not notice the smell of the sheets? did alexander get the servants to clean them?

she wonders, how many times did i fall asleep with the smell of them under my cheeks?)

Little Alex tries to jump on the soft mattress. Angie pulls him off gently. Angelica the sister gets the kindling, yielding the axe with a precision that would have made her one hell of a soldier if she'd been born with the right parts. It makes Eliza burn with a rage she didn't have inside her before. Maybe she was angry, all this time, sweet Eliza with her soft voice and soft heart and soft head, without even noticing it. 

She holds the bottle of scotch high, a gift from one of Alexander's grateful clients. The alcohol glints in the candle light as it rains down, running in rivulets between creases in the sheets. Dark brown, it smells smoky and bold, like Alexander's breath after another victorious essay. It tastes like triumph on the tongue too, and sears the throat. She makes a face and passes the bottle to her sister, who chugs it like water and throws it to the bed.

From the corner of her eyes she sees her children huddling around her eldest, throwing back their shoulders like Philip does. She tries to smile at them, but can't. She fears she won't ever be able to smile again, and it makes her even more furious. She rufuses to let _him_ steals her happiness, not when it comes to her children, so she tries again. They smile back, tentatively, her brave little ones. 

Now the fire. The brass candleholder is warm in her hands, dripping still melting wax. The letters had taken a whole candle's lenght. This one is bigger, and it flickers in the early evening wind. She cups a hand around it, shelters the little flame. She'd felt like that was all she'd done for years: protect her husband's flame, try to contain it to one single spot of heat and warmth, fighting against the winds of change. She'd wanted to believe he'd been of like mind, even grateful to her for that. Silly Eliza, nurturing her own ruin.

She'd been blind to think Alexander Hamilton was anything but a wildfire, forever hungering for more fuel to the flame. Love is blind, but it did not excuse her, or him.

(love is blind, oh, but how sweet that blindness had been).

Eliza walks around the bed, pressing the candle close to the logs on each corner, letting them lick the wood until it crackled, them moving to the next corner. It felt like a benediction, like she was a priest pressing holy water to an infants head and welcoming them to the kingdom of God. Water purified, they said, but it was fire that Eliza was holding, it was fire that csught the sheets with a start and a flicker, fire that burned her from inside and left only ash where her heart had been.

She doesn't feel like she was drowning; she felt like she'd drowned and now she was ashore again, spluttering seawater out of lungs that burned burned _burned_.

"Stay back." She tells the children, barely moving her head to look at them. The flames are rising in earnest now, Sh doesn't move, not even when heat flares into waves around her and smoke starts rising high in the air, not when the hot air presses on the delicate perfume cases and sharp glass explodes around. One shard grazes her cheek. The blood steam and almost boils right there on her skin.

Whisky and roses mingle with the smells of improvised bonfire, smoky autumn smells, and underneath all the accumulated vestiges of decades of marriage linger, suddenly clear in her memory: sleep-smell, the rare lazy morning, late night whispers. Sex, toe-curling and heartwarming. The baby smell of all her children when she nursed them against that headboard, and in the pillows, their sniffling breath when they came to their parent's bed for comfort, at night.

Gone. All the best treasures of her life, going up in flames around her. Alexander had set the fire raging. He'd left her with so little kindling; there was nothing his flames hadn't eaten already but this, this was hers to burn down.

She stays there by the fire long after the bed had been eaten to splinters and the glass had turned to sand.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com).


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